


Rudraksha

by eldritcher



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Asexuality, Epilogue to Hungarian Dances, Established Relationship, Love, M/M, Sex, Sexual exploration, The Sexuality Spectrum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29111829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: From his pilgrimage to the Himalayas, Harry has a keepsake of the prayer beads he used to cling to when huddling with hundreds of fellow seekers by the banks of the Ganga.What does he have left? A castle of ghosts, a staff of yew, a man who is afraid to be alone, and these prayer beads.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Voldemort
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24
Collections: Epilogues to eldritcher's old stories





	Rudraksha

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Hungarian Dances](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/752733) by eldritcher. 



> **Translations** :  
> Rudraksha - prayer beads  
> Roti - Flatbread  
> Ganja - Marijuana  
> Agnisakshi - As witnessed by fire

Snowbells covered the Carpathian foothills. Harry walked up to one of his favorite haunts, to the lake nestled in the hills to the west. Spring-shoots and merry running brooks greeted him. His boots were wet and his jeans drecked in mud to the knees. 

He slipped once or twice, but he was not afraid. He had his staff of yew to balance upon. Had it not safely seen him across continents, down the Ganges, to the mighty Himalayas, to the peak of Swargarohini, where in old Vyasa's cave, he had found his heart once more? 

The thawing winter's sun was bright upon the lake's startling blue. 

The lakes in the Himalayas, he remembered, had been crystal stillness. From them had been birthed rivulets that fed glaciers from whose mouth erupted the mighty Ganga. 

From the glacier, pilgrims walked, to the delta of Bengal, praying, penitent, seeking moksha. They had been poor and rich, in chronic pain or in the pink of health. In the temple-towns there had been mighty sadhus who spoke of Dharma. There had been fraudsters who sold salvation for sex or money. By the dirtied waters of the Ganges, they congregated, widows and boys and old men, and they raised their voices to greet the sunrise as one. 

Harry's clothes had reeked of ashes and sandalwood from the open cremations by the banks of the river. In the cold nights of January, pilgrims had come to him and shared their roti and ganja.

A widow, come to die alone by the river's side, turned out by sons and brothers, had taken pity on him once, when she had found him weeping by the river. She had removed her rudraksha, her prayer beads, from her neck and given it to him. 

He had tried to refuse, unwilling to take from one who had nothing. She shook her head. Grief had hollowed her to mere breath. 

"Agnisakshi," she had whispered. 

There was a half-cremated body by them. And a few paces away, they could see a priest marrying a young couple before the sanctum of a temple raised to Lord Vishnu. The man held the woman's hand tight as they walked in a circle about a fire.

Agnisakshi. By fire, wed. By fire, undone. 

In olden days, the woman would have been forced to jump into her husband's pyre after her death. By fire, wed. By fire, undone. 

Harry had taken her rudraksha beads from her. He had watched her walk away to die. 

The river flowed on. What hadn't it seen? 

\----

  
Footsteps approached him. Voldemort did not need guesswork to find Harry. He never had. 

"I did not mean to linger," Harry said ruefully, when Voldemort sat beside him on the bank of the lake, cosseting him in a perfectly conditioned warming spell. 

He had come to gather snowbells. Voldemort was fond of them. Their castle of ghosts was all that was left of the old world, of a world where magic had once been. Harry Potter, the last Wizard of Britain, Hermione had called him, when he had found his way back to her. Magic had been wiped out by the nuclear attack that the British government had undertaken to end the Wizarding war. 

Most wizards had been unable to adapt to life without magic. Many had committed suicide. Many had succumbed to mental illness. A few, as Hermione, thrived despite the loss of magic. 

Harry had kept his magic, shielded by the blood-wrought stones of Nurmengard. The castle was his, come to him by possession. 

Elks courted on the far bank, bold and full of vigor in spring's dawn. Harry watched them dance and chase, coy and brash in turn. That primal mammalian rite of rut and breeding, which he had never known, which he had never wanted to know, broken as he was by old misfortunes in a house with a cupboard. 

The rudrakshas in his hand were friends from long ago that comforted. He drew his strength from them, and remembered that woman who had given them to him, and remembered how he had clung to them as he despaired he would ever find Voldemort again. 

The teardrops of Lord Shiva, they were called. His was the dance of destruction that would herald world's end, the sadhus had taught. He had only one wife, and he had loved her above all. 

_Om Namah Shivaya_ , he had learned to chant, with the other seekers that walked the banks of the river, and he had prayed to find his path to his heart. And then, after hours of chanting, he had overheard a heated discussion by a bonfire, of holy men discussing the rumors that Vyasa had returned to his old cave upon the Swargarohini mountain. Vyasa had written the mighty epic of Mahabharata. 

Harry had known then. 

Voldemort had not learned how to make a home of his own. He had lived as a hermit crab, in Harry's soul, in Grindelwald's castle, in his father's old house, and finally in Vyasa's cave. 

The elks were noisy. The male had mounted the female, and their bleats of delighted pain-pleasure made Harry rub the beads in his hands once more.   
  
"Do you miss it?" he asked Voldemort. 

"I miss teaching magic."

Oh, Voldemort thought that Harry spoke of what they had lost, of their existence as the last wizards with magic in their veins. 

Harry rose from his perch by the lake. Voldemort watched him gather snowbells, distracted by his longing for a time that would not be theirs again. 

From their vantage point, the castle was a hulking edifice of bloodstone cut into the mountainside. From here, Harry could imagine that it was a time long ago, back when Grindelwald's army was housed there, back when Grindelwald had been plotting with his son how to break Dumbledore's forces by the Danube.

He leaned heavily on his staff, and looked at his dominion.

"As Moses beholding his promised land," Voldemort murmured. 

Milk and honey. 

He turned to Voldemort and said firmly, "Then I should be looking at you."

The soft glimmer of happiness in Voldemort's gaze Harry had become used to seeing more and more. 

In the beginning, it had been a desperate attempt to keep Harry alive. Voldemort had not wanted to be alone. His fear of death had long ago been replaced by a fear of loneliness. 

In the beginning, it had been a utilitarian decision. 

Now, now, it was love. 

Agnisakshi, Harry thought warmly, pocketing his prayer beads, and taking Voldemort's hand in his. 

He led them home. 

\----

"You referred to sex earlier," Voldemort said, as they readied to retire that night. "When we watched the elks mate." 

Harry hesitated. He did not know how to articulate his position. 

He had no desire to have his cock involved in their arrangement. Voldemort had not minded it so far. He had not asked once for more than Harry had found himself capable of offering. 

It was unfair, Harry knew. He liked to be clothed and safe, while having Voldemort nude for him, so that he may touch and kiss chastely. Without fail, his attention aroused Voldemort, and Harry was quite fond of watching him wank. The sight he made, with his toes curled and body in tremors of rapture, Harry found enchanting. 

Voldemort's cock was merely a part of him, and Harry loved all of him. While he refrained from touching Voldemort there when he was close to orgasm, it had worked well for them. 

It had worked well for Harry. He did not know if Voldemort settled for it because there was nobody else. 

Harry did not want him to settle. Here on the stones he possessed, wedded by Agnisakshi, there was no fear left, even if there was no want instinctive that came to Harry in this. 

"If you want something else, I wish to give it to you."

If Voldemort said that he wanted for nothing, Harry would know that he lied. Harry was the one lacking libido. Voldemort's sexual preferences, while he had never spoken of it, had seemed in line with those of most men from the little Harry could glean from their life over the years. 

Harry had no interest in sex for his own pleasure. His interest was in Voldemort, and sex had come to mean to Harry the intimacy of Voldemort's surrender to his chaste touches in their bed. 

"There is something I meant to try with you," Voldemort said. 

His voice was level. It betrayed nothing of how he must have immediately come to pinpoint Harry's source of distress. 

"It is invasive," Voldemort continued. 

Penetration.

Harry nodded, feeling lightheaded. He did not want it. He swallowed his instinctive refusal. Watching Voldemort's pleasure had often led to an abstract sense of pleasure for Harry. It might occur in this new act Voldemort proposed too. 

He was in his dominion, Harry reminded himself. He held a staff of yew. He held the castle. This was no house with a cupboard.   
  
"I must admit I have fantasized about this often," Voldemort continued, stripping swiftly and lying supine on their bed. "You watch me as if I fascinate you."

Harry laughed and bent to kiss the mole at the crest of Voldemort's right shoulder. He smelled of the snowbell meadows they had walked in. He smelled of the magic in Harry's staff of yew. 

"Fascination is a poor word to describe my utter bewitchment," Harry promised. "I walked from England to the peak of the mighty Swargarohini for you." 

Voldemort's smile was a soft, crooked, living curl under Harry's lips. 

"Should I strip now?" Harry asked. He was proud that his voice did not shake. 

"Perhaps not this time," Voldemort replied. "You were dressed in my fantasies."

Harry raised his eyebrows. There was shyness colored across Voldemort's features. What-

"We needn't, if this isn't to your taste."

Harry had been an idiot. He stifled a foolish laugh. Oh, he had been an idiot! 

"Let me watch you," he said happily, settling between Voldemort's legs on his belly, holding his head up on his elbows. 

Voldemort cleared his throat, discomfited by Harry's abrupt enthusiasm. His arousal had no shame and stood naked before Harry's gaze. His belly was drawn taut in tension. 

He had dared ask for this. They trusted each other with their lives, but this was trust of another kind. Overwhelmed, Harry pressed many kisses to Voldemort's thighs and knees, until the tension unwound. 

Sighing, Voldemort brought a hand to his perineum, and brushed a finger across the paper-thin skin there, and his body sung of need. Harry pushed his thighs further apart, and drew close, hungry to see this dance of pleasure enacted for him. Voldemort knew what he was doing. He did it with the practiced manner of one who had partaken of this for most of his life. The soft red of him there opened under his deft fingers, and he drove himself higher and higher until he teetered on the brink of fall. 

Sweat glistened on his belly and his brow. Harry had never seen him as given over to sensation. When he fell, he spoke Harry's name in a fervent whisper. The flesh of him quivered mad about his fingers as he dragged them out. 

The red of him there was obscene and naked in its truth afterwards, and it lay open to Harry. Overwhelmed, Harry bent his head to soothe it with warm kisses. 

"Don't," Voldemort ordered, though his voice, pleasure-wrung and soft, lent little authority to him. 

"You haven't anywhere else to be," Harry reminded him.

They had nowhere else to be. There was only this, there was only this sacred place where they gave each other what they could, these fragments left of them. Harry hoarded Voldemort, skin and mind and soul.

His was the stones of this castle. His was the staff of yew. His was this man splayed open to his chaste mouth and fingers, surrendered to his curiosity, ceded to his fierce possession.   
  
\-----

"You were unsure," Voldemort said later.

Harry shrugged. He had little inclination to ruin their afterglow by describing his fears of inadequacy and his imagination's horrible fruit of what Voldemort might want of him. 

Voldemort settled beside him, warm and nude, and Harry felt his heart skip a step when Voldemort's fingers came to curl in the thick mat of hair on his chest. 

He could speak of it. If Voldemort had dared ask for what he had, to be watched as he pleasured himself in a way lewd and unmasculine, Harry could speak of his fears. 

"I know I compare poorly to your previous lovers."

"My previous lovers?" Voldemort asked, surprised. 

Harry pinched Voldemort's shoulder blade in annoyance. Surely he knew what Harry spoke of!

"Harry, I knew only of power and sex, and their places of convergence," Voldemort said irritably. "You are the only lover I have known." 

That deserved a kiss. That deserved many kisses, and Voldemort was laughing and protesting when Harry dragged his lips along the crook of his elbow where he was ticklish. 

"What you did-" Harry began, awkward and determined. 

"You and I know that I am quite adept at pleasuring myself," Voldemort said plainly, refusing to be embarrassed. 

It was true. Voldemort saw to his own pleasure without shirking or shying. He had always handled his own body in the manner of one well-learned in its form and quirks. 

"We needn't re-enact this if it disturbed you."

"No, no!" Harry exclaimed, horrified at the thought of this shiny new adventure being taken away from him. "I wanted to ask for more."

"For more?" Voldemort asked cautiously. 

"My fingers," Harry said in a rush, determined and yet mortified. 

Voldemort's inhale was a stutter. Harry felt the warmth of his cheek against a palm. 

"I am not averse to it," Voldemort said finally. 

"I know." 

The wryness of Harry's tone tickled them both, and they began laughing at their negotiations. 

When Voldemort nodded off on Harry's chest, he wore his smile to sleep. 

It suited him.

\-----

His joints were creaky and he was glad for his staff as he climbed the circular stairs cut into a tower that opened to the roof.

A night's tradition, from the first time he had seen the full moon over winter's sprawl in the Carpathians. There had been an avalanche that night. The wolves had hunted under the moon, baying their way across the snow-covered foothills. 

Harry placed a hand over his mad-thudding heart, as he sweated from his exertion on the stairs. From the castle's ramparts, in the light snowfall, holding his staff, he rubbed his rudraksha in instinct. The stones thrummed beneath his feet. The old screams of Grindelwald's prisoners haunted their veins. The staff of yew in his hand soothed, grounding him once more in the present. 

The present. 

What did time matter? 

The world that was his was here, in the castle and in the man he kept there. Nobody would know how they had loved or held or died. The last wizards and the last stones that wore magic. No historian would know of their end. 

  
\------

"I brought you snowbells." 

The dew upon the flowers sparkled bright, but it compared not to the brilliant happiness that blazed in Voldemort's eyes. 

The fire was merry in their hearth. It held witness as Harry knelt before Voldemort and offered the posy of snowbells. It held witness as Voldemort bent to kiss his forehead. 

In the Carpathians, cradled amidst its clear lakes and steep ravines, wolves roved boundless, and winds sung tales of ancient heavens. Harry's heart sung fiercer then spring's wild glory, exulting in their coda of two.

The fire held witness.

"Agnisakshi," he vowed to his heart before his hearth's fire. 

  


* * *

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed these codas to old tales! I'll see you next week on [Pandemic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28860678/chapters/70797012). 
> 
> You can read [Hungarian Dances on Dreamwidth](https://eldritcher-hp-fics.dreamwidth.org/20541.html), along with other old stories.


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